Occasional shop talk about journalism, technology and a few other things

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Something looked broken with Web search on my computer yesterday, and it took me only about 18 hours of detours to figure out the problem. To spare you all the trouble of repeating my troubleshooting, here’s how things worked out.

My first thought–both frightened and angry–was that I’d finally gotten hit with a virus like DNSChanger on my own computer. But the same hijacked search happened in another Mac and on the Chromebook I’d just reviewed.

But the router had nothing amiss with its domain-name-server settings. Meanwhile, doing the same search in the browser on an AT&T Android phone (another recent review) didn’t yield any spurious results. Tworeplies on Twitter also suggested this issue might be specific to Internet providers.

My last move before getting distracted by our daughter was to try the same search on other sites. At Bing, the result also got hijacked; at DuckDuckGo, it did not.

This morning, as I was using Safari’s Web Inspector to see if I could get any more insight on the mechanics of the hijack (and take the screengrab you see above), another Twitter reply suggested that it could be an issue with CEA’s installation of WordPress. There is a history of exploits for that popular blogging platform that target incoming referrers from popular sites to send those clicks elsewhere; see, for instance, this Q&A thread.

Sucuri LLC’s malware-checking site didn’t find any malware at CEA’s blog. But when I e-mailed somebody at the Arlington, Va., trade association, they did find a malicious script on the site that’s since been removed. And now, my original search takes me to the right page.

So I guess reporting this counts as this week’s good deed for the Internet… and maybe a start on next weekend’s USA Today column. But before I do that: Have you run into anything like this? Were you able to get it resolved? What else would you like to know about search hijacking?

First a reader e-mailed to ask about the easiest way to host a blog under a personal domain name; then, between my filing this piece and USAT posting it, two friends asked me the same question. I guess the timing was right for the topic. The column also offers a tip that emerged from a comment thread here: You can recharge an iPad over any random charger with a USB port, not just a higher-powered model labeled as iPad-compatible.

Here I discuss the cable industry’s proposal to encrypt the local, public, educational and government channels that “QAM” (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) tuners in digital TVs can receive without a box. Would you trade that–cable operators say encrypting QAM will free new customers from having to wait for the cable guy to show up–for the Federal Communications Commission making its “AllVid” proposal for box-free reception a standard for both cable and satellite? For further reading: The National Cable & Telecommunications Association’s Paul Rodriguez explains why cable operators don’t like the “traps” they now use to control access, while venture capitalist Fred Wilson argues for keeping clear QAM and providing the broadcast channels for free.

I discussed ways to tame an overloaded inbox with WAMU host Kojo Nnamdi and two other guests, etiquette author Anna Post and IBM social-computing evangelist Luis Suarez. You hear more of me in the second half of the show, after Suarez’s call-in segment ended. (Tip: You can speak in paragraphs on public radio, but they have to be newspaper paragraphs.)

The headline I wrote may oversell this story a bit–but, really, the feature set on the next iPad should not be that hard to figure out. And if this post isn’t the only next-iPad piece you elect to read, it’s certainly the only one I plan to write, just as I only wrote one next-iPhone post last year.

My second monthly chat for CEA started a little slow, but I wound up getting enough questions from readers to stick around for an extra 15 minutes. One query I got confirmed my decision to devote next week’s CEA post to the upcoming reallocation of some spectrum from TV to wireless data mandated by this week’s payroll tax-cut bill. Another may yield an item for my USA Today column: how to connect an ’80s-vintage Nintendo NES (no, really) to an HDTV.